


Pack Animals

by inadistantworld



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Backstory, Beginning of a Found Family, Vignette, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-06 13:36:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13412391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inadistantworld/pseuds/inadistantworld
Summary: They found each other through accident or destiny. Or maybe just because wolves are pack animals.They didn't find each other because of their shared condition, nobody knew their new travelling companions were also werewolves until the first full moon where they all shifted together.Well, almost all of them.Or the fic where everyone but Travis-I mean Fjord-is a werewolf and he really wants to be one too.





	Pack Animals

They met by pure coincidence, though some would call it destiny.

But maybe, deep down, it was because wolves are pack animals.

 

Caleb met another werewolf two years after he’d been turned and she physically balked when she saw him.

“You live like this?” She looked at him in horror. She was not a noble looking woman or anything, she was actually just a seamstress in a small town he had been passing through, but in comparison to Caleb she might as well have been a queen.

Caleb had been living in the woods, on the streets, maybe in a tavern here and there, but he had stopped living in polite society a while ago, and he looked like it. He simply shrugged in response.

“You look like exactly what they’re looking for,” she shook her head and stepped back, as if being in the same room would give her away too.

And Caleb did. He had dark bags under his eyes, unshaven, his hair was a mess, his clothes were covered in two years’ worth of dirt, and he smelled like wet dog. If someone were to ask around looking for someone who looked like a werewolf they probably would have been pointed to Caleb.

He had met the woman in the woods while they were hunting. They had known each other immediately and he found her the next day. He never saw her again after that.

And when he found Nott…it had been an accident.

It was under the light of the full moon that he smelled the foul scent of goblin. He could only smell one though, which was a good sign. A hoard of them could have overwhelmed him, but one wouldn’t be an issue if it attacked.

A dark shape darted out of the shadows and Caleb moved instinctually and lashed out, biting into the shoulder of the creature. He was ready to finish the job, to kill the goblin and get it over with, when he heard her scream, “Please! Please stop!” and she began to sob.

Caleb was never very good with crying.

He sat back and looked at the goblin. A girl goblin, which was a rare sight. Her clothes were ragged, her ears drooped, and she was now clutching the wound at her shoulder. The thought passed through his mind to kill her now, to save her from this curse. If he let her live, she would become like him. A monster.

She sat up, sniffled, and broke down. She told him everything that had happened to her, that she had been kicked out of her ‘family’ (Caleb wasn’t sure she should still call them that), that she’d been trying to find a way to live in the woods, and when she saw the wolf she was just trying to run away.

Nott didn’t know he was also a man, that he understood, she only knew that the wolf was listening and making the right mournful noises at the right time and his sad eyes had lost the dangerous glint in them.

And when she was done Caleb very suddenly stood up, grabbed her by the back of her cloak, and carried her off, back to the small shelter he had set up for himself before he shifted.

That was the first time Nott believed he had saved her life.

Nott didn’t see the change as a curse like Caleb did, instead she saw it as something that gave her the power to protect herself if she needed to, and a way to survive on her own. She saw Caleb as someone who made it so that she didn’t have to. That was the next time she said he saved her life. He was someone who was there for her when nobody else was, someone who was always on her side.

The first time Caleb thought she saved his life was when she stayed. When he woke up the next morning in the body of a very tired, dirty man and Nott looked at him and pointed to the jerky she had gotten from his pack, “Are you going to eat this?” As if his condition was nothing, not even an inconvenience.

After that, when he explained to her what he had done, how sorry he was, how he never meant to turn her, she just asked if he was going to teach her how to do it right. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t devastated, she wasn’t the slightest bit upset. And in the next couple of months Caleb learned something from Nott, which was interesting because he had been a werewolf for years and was supposed to be showing her the ropes. What he learned from her was that he didn’t have to be alone. Not only that, which was an amazing revelation on its own, but he didn’t have to hate himself for it.

This lesson was taking more time, it was not an immediate change, but there were moments where he almost…enjoyed this part of himself. And it was what led to him spending more than a single night in a town, it was what led them to Trostenwold, which led them to, well, everything else.

 

Yasha and Molly met after they joined the carnival, not that all werewolves are carnies (just a fair amount). They didn’t become friends because of their shared activities on full moons but instead because, even in a place of freaks and outcasts, being “of devils and angels” was a little too different to fit in. The werewolf part was a nice bonus to their friendship, it was good to have a hunting partner and someone to spend the long nights with in an unfamiliar form. It was something to connect over. And while Yasha wasn’t a Blood Hunter, she did like to help.

Blood Hunters have a bad habit of going too far, of losing themselves in the hunt, even of becoming too much like the ones they’re after. It is a dangerous path to walk, and Molly would be lying if he said that he had never felt himself slipping. It was Yasha who had his back in those moments.

Molly was bright, he was an ego in silk, he was skilled and he knew it. And he almost always got his prey. But in moments where he almost became the things he hunted, Yasha would give him a blank look and ask, “Didn’t you say you were the good guy?” or “If I have to kill you, I won’t hesitate.” She was not like most of her kin, but the heart of her race still lingered in her. Do good, make the world safer, destroy evil.

It was this that kept Molly in line. Yasha had only had to remind him three times in their years together, and all it ever took was a few words. Likely because Yasha was a woman of few words. If she could say it in four words, why use five? Molly was the opposite, the more words he used the farther he could string someone along. But Yasha chose her words, not exactly with care, but with intent. And if she said Molly wasn’t who he set out to be, it was because she knew it to be true. If she said she would kill Molly without hesitation, it was because she meant it.

Despite how different they were, Mollymauk really liked that about her. He needed someone to hold him accountable but he didn’t need someone with a bleeding heart to try and make him feel guilty for his actions, and Yasha was the perfect companion for him.

Yasha couldn’t say she needed Mollymauk in the way he needed her, but she did enjoy his company. He talked when she wanted someone to fill the space, he was observant, funny enough, and handled a lot of the business side of things which she detested. He was strong enough that she didn’t need to protect him most of the time, he was on the same side as her in every fight they’d ever been in, and he was, in general, a good person.

She also liked that she didn’t have to be alone anymore, even in her wolf form. She’d been alone for a long time, it was good to have someone again. Though she wouldn’t say it in so many words, if at all.

 

Beauregard couldn’t be quite certain how she was turned, and technically she wasn’t sure where, and she didn’t really know who did it. But she had very strong feelings about the where, when, and how.

She used to travel alone, not exactly adventuring, just traveling. She went from town to town to see the sights, the girls, and the taverns. And it was almost a year into her traveling that she wandered into a small town in the mountains, nice enough really, and met a girl. Nothing particularly special about the town, the girl, or the tavern, but this girl may have had a suitor or a brother or perhaps just a concerned citizen, to be honest Beau didn’t pay a ton of attention.

It was at about this point that Beau’s memory of that night began to get a little fuzzy.

The man (whose face was a hazy blur) came up to her, told her to get out of town and never come back. Beau looked at him with narrowed eyes and said, “What’re you gonna do? Make me?”

To which he replied, “You don’t want that, little girl.”

Beau burped. And then the rest of the night was lost.

The next morning she woke up in a strange bed and her forearm had bled through the bandages someone had put on her. When she peaked underneath she saw she was missing a good chunk of her flesh. When she walked out of the bedroom she saw a kindly old woman standing over a pot on the fire. She smiled and asked how Beau was doing. She had heard a loud commotion that woke her in the night and heard that someone had started a bar fight but nobody could find the girl who did it.

They had also lost the man she had fought.

And since the woman was awake she decided to help in the search because this man had a terrible habit for taking things too far. She found Beau in the woods bleeding, but thankfully alive.

Beau wasn’t too upset about the fight, after all it was obvious that she had won the fight and now she would have a bitchin’ scar to prove it.

Additional proof that she had won was that when she went for a victory drink at the tavern, it was closed, the windows were broken, pieces of chairs were outside on the street, and four or five angry looking men told her to get out of their town or they’d take her to the next town over and throw her in jail. So she shrugged and said, “Fuck it, this town sucks anyways.”

Eight days later she shifted under the full moon for the first time. It was not a pleasant experience.

But it was pretty fucking sweet.

 

Jester was a teenager when she met a traveler on the road. He wore a dark blue cloak and had a clean and well-trimmed white beard. The man smiled and had a light voice and he talked about something that Jester had been looking for. Change.

Jester didn’t find the conversation very odd, despite how he talked about it, like he was testing her. He asked her what she thought about it and she answered it very honestly. “I do not think it matters how I feel about it, it will happen anyways.”

This seemed to please the man and he laughed quietly, “That is true, but do you fight it or welcome it?”

She leaned in to him and there was a light that danced behind her eyes, “I seek it,” she whispered.

There is a common warning in the world. _Beware the gifts of the Traveler._

Jester has never been well versed in the warnings of the world.

“I like you, Jester,” the man said with a playful grin. She didn’t ask how he had guessed her name, she didn’t even realize she hadn’t told him.

“I quite like you too!”

He hummed as they walked for a while. “Say, would you like your fortune to be read?” He had a sly sideways glance over to her that she missed in her excitement.

“You could do that?”

He held up a hand, waved his fingers, and three cards appeared. “I can do quite a few things. What do you say?”

“Yes! Yes, of course!” She hoped for answers on her father, he was why she had started on her journey.

He plucked one card and turned it around for her. It was a black card with a dark blue symbol she had never seen and a word beneath it that she didn’t understand. “You will travel quite far for what you seek, but you will find it. The cost will be great, it always is, but you will know what to do when the time comes.”

She nodded and steeled herself in her heart, she had known it would be hard.

He took the second card. Once again with a symbol and word she had never seen. “You will be an instrument of change for this world, a grand future lies ahead of you. I must ask, are you prepared to make the hard decisions you will need to?”

“Oh yes, I am very good at making decisions like this. Yesterday I—”

He interrupted her with the third card, one that she still didn’t understand. “This is the card of transformation. It is for those who…” he grinned, “ _seek_ change. Change will become instrumental in your life. It is my favorite card. I would like to give it to you.” He held it out to her.

She slowly took it from his hand and looked at it in complete awe. And when she looked up to thank him, he had vanished.

The next full moon she shifted into her wolf form with delightfully blue fur. It took a few months but she eventually found out the man she had met on the road was called The Traveler, a god of change and chaos, the patron of those who transform and embrace change, like changelings, shifters, and lycanthropes.

He wandered the world looking for adventurers who embraced change and would often give them gifts, ones that were amazing and powerful and great, but were also double-edged swords and were dangerous and usually the people who received a gift would regret it upon use. Jester was not like most of the others, she saw her gift as a wonderful gift. Inconvenient at times, hard at times, but her god wouldn’t steer her wrong and she embraced it in the way any cleric of change and chaos would.

 

And it was by pure accident they all found each other. In their human forms they couldn’t sniff each other out, but perhaps there was a pull between them. Perhaps they were drawn to each other by something unseen and unknowable, because wolves do best in groups than alone.

And Fjord? Well Fjord just got caught in the middle.

 

They hadn’t even been travelling together for a month, and while there were tensions (Molly and Beau didn’t exactly get along, Yasha had disappeared for weeks and then just wandered into their camp one morning, Caleb was always brooding, and Nott had tried to steal something out of Beau’s pack and Beau promptly knocked Nott unconscious and that had been…an ordeal), they for the most part were getting along fine. Not great, but fine. They weren’t travelling together because they believed they were a family, it was mostly because they worked well as a team and were hired as a team.

But one night was weirder than the others. Everyone insisted on going to a tavern and getting their own room, completely ignoring Fjord when he said how much it would cost, and while he had a strong voice in the group nobody would sway. So he said fine. He had hoped Caleb would let him stay with him and Nott, but Caleb was firm in needing his space and only Nott was allowed into his room. And Molly and Yasha were rooming together and when he went to talk to them about it Yasha just looked at him and he shut his mouth before he even said anything.

And after they got their rooms, everyone ate in the tavern and left quickly. Even Beau, who rarely left taverns before she was thrown out, went upstairs before it was even fully dark. And Fjord wasn’t exactly fond of the eyes of neighboring tables on him after everyone left, so he followed suit and went to bed early that night as well.

He had noticed that some nights Beau and Jester would retire early, but there was nothing like this. And Beau and Jester were always a little weird, but the entire group was just being ridiculous. But there just wasn’t anything he could do about it.

That night, as Fjord slept soundly in his expensive room, everyone quietly snuck out into the woods and when the moon was high they shifted into their other form. And when they finished they were immediately overwhelmed by the scent of a pack nearby. And they all moved towards the smell of others like them and found each other.

The next morning Fjord came down the stairs to the bar in hopes of getting breakfast and saw the entire group already awake and eating huge plates of food (it looked like Nott was on her second). They were laughing, talking loudly, openly, even Yasha was smiling.

“Glad to see we’re all getting along this morning,” Fjord said slowly, not totally trusting this sudden turn.

Jester laughed, “Yes! It is nice to know we have something in common!”

Fjord frowned and Caleb cleared his throat as an obvious warning. “What do ya mean?” Fjord asked.

“That we are all werewolves!” Jester answered with the excitement of a child during a festival.

Silence fell over the table and they all watched Fjord with wide eyes as they waited to hear what he had to say. They all looked like they wanted to deny it or explain it, like they wanted to say something, but nobody seemed to have the words they were looking for.

Nobody except for Fjord.

Fjord’s response was so quiet they all had to lean in to hear him, “Somebody please bite me.”

**Author's Note:**

> You guys I just love werewolves and I love the idea that everyone individually decided to make Travis jealous by being a werewolf. Not what happened, but fun to think about anyways.  
> Also I'm really into the Traveler and I can't wait to see Jester's relationship with him and the history of her following him and all that. Especially because he is the patron to lycanthropes and I hope that comes into play at some point because I love werewolves about as much as Travis.  
> Hope you guys had a little fun with this, I was going to wait until I had more to go on for the characters but this just felt like a fun idea and fic is supposed to be fun, right? Hopefully?  
> Anyways, thanks for reading and I hope you guys enjoy tonight's episode!


End file.
